"I'll try to keep it brief," Macklin said. "To me the one great, distinguishing quality of creative genius is sanity—a sanity that illuminates every aspect of human experience. I'll quote you a passage from Emily Dickinson: 'Pardon me my sanity in an insane world.'
"Well, that makes sense to me, that sums it up. I'll tell you why. A creative artist has superior insights into the nature of reality. Reason, completely rational behavior—common sense on a high level, if you want to put it in another way—is a must with the creative mind, if it isn't to be crippled or completely destroyed.
"A man of creative genius wages a terrific struggle for survival every waking moment and even in his sleep. He is torn by emotions a hundred times as tumultuous as those of the average person. He has all the emotional intensity of your so-called 'mad genius', granted. But it stops there. He's simply incapable of accepting the lunacies of society at its most neurotic, its most hare-brained. In fact, he's incapable of accepting or compromising with those lunacies at any point. His basic sanity is too great."
"Just what are you trying to say, Jim?" Eaton asked.
"Simply this. He has a fifty percent chance of winning that struggle because a man of creative genius has much more than the average person's inner strength. Don't kid yourself. He has, or he'd go down fast. Few people could survive the kind of battle he wages with himself every waking hour for ten minutes at a stretch.
"Life itself, just the terrible kind of punishment that life inflicts—illnesses, misfortunes of every kind, tragic accidents, death—can hurt him much more than you or I can be hurt, simply because he has the emotional sensitivity which goes with genius.
"All right. He has at least a fighting chance of winning that struggle and contributing something important, a new insight, a new vision which will enrich human life. But what intensifies the struggle, making it so bad at times it's a wonder all creative artists don't go straight out and jump off the bridge, is the often completely irrational behavior of the people he meets.
"Don't you see? They fasten themselves on him, make impossible demands, take advantage of his sensitivity by making him a kind of target for all of their own frustrations and unrealistic adjustments to life—"
Macklin paused and spread his hands. "I could go on and on, but I think I've said enough."
"I think you have," Ellers commented, wryly. "I don't agree at all—with any part of it."